The Palace's Stories
by Migratory Housefly
Summary: A series of fluff short stories mainly centering around Chrom, Sumia, Robin, and Tharja. Mostly takes place during the two-year timeskip in Awakening. Ongoing.
1. The Pegasus Knight's Experience

A light drizzle sprinkled its way across the Shepherds' training grounds, steady as it had been all week, keeping the layer of mud on the ground constantly refreshed and ready to splatter. Chrom had wisely decided to forsake most of the ornamental aspects of his armor today, but that was a small comfort while lying face-first on the wet sparring ground, laid out because his foot had been six inches too deep in the ground to evade an incoming blow.

Vaike helped him to his feet, a massive grin on his face despite the fact that by square footage of mud he was still losing quite badly. "Another round?" he said.

"No, I think I'm going to check on how everybody else is doing," Chrom said. Everybody else was almost certainly doing about as well as he was, but any excuse that got his face away from the ground for a few minutes was a good one. After he was back in the palace, priority number one was getting some grass planted here.

Vaike paired off with another figure made unidentifiable by coverage of earth, while Chrom made his way slowly through the training grounds, trying to pass along helpful comments and observations as slowly and leisurely as possible. This wasn't a good day for training, but since the alternative was to head back into the palace and find out what new problem demanded the immediate attention of the Exalt, he stretched out his time for as long as possible.

He found himself wandering towards the pitch on which the pegasus riders were practicing, hoping to catch a glimpse of his wife. Sure enough, she was blazing through their pace trials, leading the pack despite the weather. As he got nearer, she broke off from the pitch towards him, made a banking U-turn overhead as she excitedly shouted "Hi, honey!", and made her way back to the pitch without even losing her place.

After they had been married, some of the palace staff had tried to explain that the wife of the reigning monarch was not required to continue working. Sumia had considered this for all of five seconds before she had realized that this would mean less flying.

Back on ground level, the Shepherds' magic-users were running through a remarkably efficient training program of Frederick's invention. The idea was that the pegasus riders, in the course of their movement drills, would drop large targets to mark the locations they had visited. Meanwhile, magic users on the ground would try and hit the targets before they could hit the ground, to hone their aim and reflexes. In theory the mages and riders didn't need to pay attention to each other's progress, but it had quickly warped into a sort of competition between the two to see if the riders could drop a certain number of targets without the mages hitting them down. This naturally resulted in a bit of overzealousness, and a few missed spells making close calls near the already-skittish horses almost launched riders from their saddles, eventually forcing Frederick to step in and disallow carpet-bombings.

Chrom caught sight of Robin and Tharja standing in the row of magic users, and made his way over to them. Despite the stationary nature of the exercise, Robin's coat and pants were still splattered with dirt up to his knees. Tharja was perfectly clean. Life was full of mysteries.

"Afternoon, Chrom," Robin said genially while Tharja glowered beside him. He waved a clipboard that didn't look like it was particularly capable of casting spells. "How's the rain treating you?"

"Same as always," Chrom said, wondering how long you could keep a foot suspended in water before it bloated uncontrollably. "You guys leading in targets hit, I suppose?"

"Nah," said Robin. "I'm not participating, and Cordelia asked Tharja to stop for the day."

"I was winning," Tharja said firmly. "It still counts if you hit the targets before they drop them."

"I was on your side; I thought it was brilliant," Robin said. "Some people just don't like fire. It doesn't matter; we can start experimenting today anyway."

"Experimenting? Is that what the clipboard is for?" Chrom asked. Robin's tendency to think of perpendicular paths through problems had proven useful on multiple occasions, so Chrom was ready to give anything he offered a shot, even if it sounded daft at first impression.

"Exactly," Robin said. "I've been meaning to try it out. I have this new idea."

"He has a very bad idea," Tharja said.

"I'm telling you, it'll work," Robin said confidently.

"I don't care how well it works, it's still a bad idea," Tharja said

Chrom held up his hands. "Can I at least hear what it is before I start mediating?" he asked.

Robin nodded. "Ask Sumia to land and meet us over-" he looked around and pointed to a large empty patch of the castle grounds- "-there. And ask her to bring some of those targets if she can."

"Okay," Chrom said. "But what for?"

"I'll explain when we get there. She needs to hear it as well." Robin said.

He departed to the indicated field. Tharja followed with an elaborate but extremely rapid show of reluctance. Chrom shrugged, looked up back up towards the group of riders, and waved until he caught Sumia's attention.

Through a complicated feat of body language, he managed to indicate that she should head towards the field as soon as she could, that she should bring her targets along with her, that she would be able to get back to practice immediately afterwards, and that Robin was having one of his idea moments and it would be best just to go along with it. She waved in recognition, and soared away.

Chrom arrived to the field a few moments earlier, where Robin and Tharja were waiting quietly on top of a slight rise at the edge of the field. Moments later, Sumia plopped into a landing in front of them, and dropped off her horse directly into an ankle-deep patch of mud.

"Hey guys!" she said loudly, staggering her way to more solid ground with a dull sucking noise. "Sorry I'm late. I went to get a few extra targets for you." She patted the saddlebag with a dull thump. "I don't need to get back to practice for a while. What's your new idea, Robin?"

Robin aimed a curious sidelong glance at Chrom, who shrugged as evocatively as he could.

"Well, I'm not going to profess to being an expert on pegasus warfare," Robin said, returning his gaze to normal. "But I've been working for you guys for a long time, and I think I've developed a decent sense of how these things tick. For instance." He pointed at Sumia's mount, "Your pegasus can carry more than one person at a time, can't it?"

"Well, yeah," she said uncertainly, affectionately rubbing the neck of the winged horse, which stood where it had landed staring disinterestedly at the sodden ground. "This guy can carry up to three person's worth of weight for a while. Maybe more, but he'd get tired pretty quickly and the people would probably have to sit on each other's shoulders. Why?"

Robin stowed away his clipboard somewhere inside that unfathomable coat of his, and walked over to start rummaging through the saddlebag on Sumia's horse. She looked confused for a moment, but apparently saw no use in questioning him. Eventually, Robin found the bag he was looking for and pulled out an armful of targets that they and the mages used to practice. "Do you think somebody on pegasusback would be able to hit one of these things on the ground from the air?" Robin said.

"Sure. That's what dark fliers do, isn't it?" Sumia said, her armor quietly clanking as she shrugged.

"What about somebody riding behind you? Would they be able to aim reliably?" Robin said.

"What with the wings obstructing vision, the lack of control, and being a hundred feet in the air," Tharja added.

Sumia seemed thoughtful. "I don't know. The wings would probably get in the way from a lot of angles, come to think of it. Plus carrying two people messes up the flight profile, and that might go really bad if you mix wind magic into the mix," she said. "And I don't see why we would need to double up anyway; we've never been short on mounts," she added, a hint of pride creeping into her voice over serving such an equine-rich nation.

"I'm not really thinking of a permanent arrangement," Robin said, nodding. "Just something in case we need an aerial strike force with a bit more firepower on short notice, or the terrain doesn't suit our ground-based ranged units. Plus, it lets the male Shepherds get more advantage out of our winged mounts even if the horses don't listen to them."

"Sounds like an interesting concept," Chrom said, shrugging. "What's the catch?"

"It's a bad idea," Tharja said.

"It doesn't really sit well with Tharja," Robin said diplomatically. "That's what we're out here to settle."

Chrom nodded. Tharja's lack of enthusiasm was characteristic of her personality, but this particular issue probably ran slightly deeper. She was one of the only female members of the Shepherds who had never done even basic training with any flying mount, which meant a certain amount of paranoia in that direction made sense. She had done short hops for transport, but any strategy that would inevitably involve her having to spend large amounts of time in the air was unlikely to catch her interest,

"So what's the plan?" Chrom said.

"We do a short trial target practice run with one of us in the air and one of us on the ground, and see if there's a substantial difference between the number of targets we leave standing," Robin said, holding up the row of discs in his arm. "That's why asked for you, Sumia. Way I figure it, you're the best flier here."

Sumia beamed. "Sounds fun. Are you going to be riding with me, Tharja?" Sumia said, apparently oblivious to the idea that anybody could dislike flying.

"No," Tharja said shortly.

"Hey, I'm good at flying," Sumia said, still smiling, not even trying to hide her pride at being described as 'best flier here'. "I don't see what you're worried about. Even if we crash you're going to be fine, we have a lot of healers. Lissa's right over there. At least I think so. That's a lot of mud." She paused briefly, and glanced back at Tharja. "What's the matter? You've flown with me once or twice before."

"Those times we were just riding the horse from one place to another," Tharja said, eyeing Sumia's mount warily. "I am not riding one of those things if it means performing aerial acrobatics. Or making high-speed dives. Or looking down."

"I'll be riding with you, Sumia," Robin said, wisely stepping forward before Sumia tried to educate Tharja on the hidden wonders of the skies. "Tharja's just going to be standing on the ground. Not really a very scientific experiment, but it's just a proof of concept."

"If I hit more than you, you have to admit it's a bad idea," Tharja said flatly.

"I'll think about it," Robin said. He handed the stack of disposable targets to Chrom, and strode off to Sumia's pegasus. "Let's go, then."

"Wait. What do I do with these?" Chrom said, hoisting the targets.

"Spread them out in the middle of the field," Robin said, gesturing around, already climbing on top of the winged horse. "Anywhere's fine, just keep them above the waterline."

"Why is this my job, then?" Chrom said, more perplexed than actually annoyed.

"Do you really want to go back to sparring in this weather?" Robin asked, without even looking back.

Chrom, as a matter of fact, did not. He handed off half the targets to Tharja as Sumia took off and started making slow loops a short height above the field, and within a few minutes they had scattered most of them in such a way that they could be seen from both the ground and the air. Chrom tried to make light conversation with Tharja while they worked, which was a task appropriately comparable to trying to walk in foot-deep mud.

From what little discussion did occur, Chrom gathered that the basic idea was that on Chrom's mark, Robin would set ablaze as many targets as he could in two minutes, then they would reset and give Tharja her shot from the ground. Apparently Robin had originally wanted to do both trials himself, but Tharja fully expected him to deliberately undershoot the first test to skew the results, probably because that was exactly what she would do.

"He said also wants to do a run while the horse is just taking a walk on the ground. And that we might have to pin Sumia down for that one. I can help, that's an easy curse," Tharja said blankly, dropping her last target. "Anyway, let's get this over with."

They retreated back to the rise on the edge of the field, Chrom's careful tread still not preventing him from nearly losing his boot once or twice. His thoughts drifted once again to the many benefits that a growth of grass had on topsoil health. Eventually back on firmish ground, he held up both his thumbs as Sumia came around on a pass.

After a short pause, small fireballs were flinging towards the center of the field, periodically causing a target to flare up before the rain noticed the upstart and beat it back into submission. Robin's aim was quite good given the circumstances, much to Tharja's visible consternation. By the time Chrom called time, Robin had managed to hit a little over half the number of targets they had placed.

"That was a decent run, I think," Robin said, sliding off of Sumia's pegasus after she had brought it down beside them. He pulled out his clipboard again and started marking down his results. "Had a bit trouble aiming on the sudden dips, though. What do you think, Sumia?"

"Fine, I'm fine," Sumia said vaguely, a slightly singed patch of her hair speaking otherwise. She jumped off the horse and managed to land in the same patch of mud as before. Chrom was momentarily concerned, but she seemed to cheer up once she had steadied herself back upright.

"I think it went great," she said, an embarrassed smile on her face. "A bit tricky flying with the extra weight, but I can manage."

"Right," said Robin, returning his clipboard away once more into the depths of his coat. "Let's get back in the air so we can drop some targets for Tharja's go."

"Wait a minute," said Chrom, who had just spent minutes trudging through mud putting down targets and was not about to have his industry maligned. "What happened to hand-placing them? I figured you had a reason for that."

"That was Tharja's idea," Robin said, shrugging.

"I thought if he placed the targets from the air he would make sure they fell in places that were easy to hit from the air," Tharja said in a tone that suggested it was the most obvious thing in the world. Her clothes were still perfectly clean. Life was unfair.

"I don't blame you. That does sound like something I would do," Robin said, already back on top of the horse. Sumia climbed up after him, and they were back up in the air. This time, instead of making a casual loop around the field, they made an erratic pattern across while periodically dropping the targets. Gods be damned, it _was_ a better way of placing them.

Tharja stood tensely watching the targets fall, her spellbook already flipped open to the appropriate page, obviously keen to prove her point. Her usual paranoid grimace was now one of fixed determination, and her overall body language was precisely the magical equivalent of somebody holding a warhammer over their head, very eager to drop it but more eager to make sure it hit something squishy.

Robin let the last target go and gave the thumbs up from across the field. Then a lot of things happened in the space of about four seconds.

First, Tharja let fly a volley of spells almost instantly, the latter ones igniting about half a dozen of the targets nearer to them. The first one she fired, however, honed with a couple weeks training with the pegasus fliers, went straight across the pitch and set ablaze the target that Robin had just dropped, right as it was passing beneath the horse's hind legs.

The poor creature, probably already skittish to the point of shellshock, did not react well to something of that size igniting directly behind it. It probably wanted nothing more in life than a nice open sky to fly around in, a cool stream to drink out of, and some green grass to eat, all of which were natural enemies of fire. Small bits of fire going away from it were presumably anxiety-inducing, and a large volume of fire erupting beneath its feet could only be the final straw. Therefore, it could not be blamed for what it did next, which was buck.

Sumia was an experienced and naturally gifted pegasus rider, which provided her with the necessary skill and experience to stay on her mount's back long enough to bring it back to the ground and calm it down. Robin was a tactician.

In most circumstances, the fall off of a pegasus in flight was inevitably a short story with an extremely predictable outcome. Chrom had that story reenacted right in front of him as Robin fell from the saddle, but luckily aspects of the setting served to give it a twist ending. First was that Sumia had been flying lower than normal in deference to Robin's experiment. The second was that, at the moment, the ground was very, very soft. Robin's landing was safe, if undignified.

Robin unsteadily got up from the spot he had landed, only vaguely human in shape and color but at least upright. Chrom breathed a sigh of relief, and only then noticed the fresh spray of mud up his side. While investigating the source, he realized that Tharja was no longer standing next to him, but sprinting full-tilt across the field towards Robin, staying atop the mud like a small lizard running across a river.

When Chrom had finally caught up with her, she was clinging to his neck, decidedly filthy from contact but no less willing to let go. Robin, being quite prepared for this, merely shifted his weight to accommodate her as he discussed the finer points of the flight with Sumia. Luckily for everybody involved, he seemed less than eager about continuing the experiment.

"It's a flaw I really should have seen from the beginning, though," he said, paying no regard to Tharja's face buried in his neck. "I mean, you get bumps and dips like that all the time when you're seriously flying, don't you?"

"All the time," Sumia said, fretting slightly. "Cordelia almost had an accident like that earlier today on the pitch. I'm really sorry, though. It's my fault, I didn't think you would get thrown off."

"That's because you sit on one of those things like you're nailed down," Chrom said, putting his arm around her. "Can't blame you for forgetting that us mortals are only used to two dimensions."

"Well, whoever's fault it is, I think we can agree that it was a bad idea in general," Robin said. A muffled sardonic cheer was audible from Tharja's direction. Chrom merely nodded in agreement.

"Worth a shot, at least," he said. Truth be told, he thought there was still some merit in it, at least if they let the passengers get some basic experience in hanging on during tight maneuvers. But he wasn't about to bring that up in front of Tharja right now. Instead, he looked around between the four of them, thought over all they had been through today, shrugged, and then made the sort of judgement that call that people expected out of an effective leader.

"We all need to take at least three baths."


	2. The Tactician's Memory

Rain blatted heavily against the windows, as steady now as it had been since the start of the day. Sumia gazed absent-mindedly out at it while she waited for her husband's meeting to end, wondering if Frederick had found the good sense to ground the Pegasus riders' exercises for the day. The thought was rather doubtful, which gave her mixed feelings. On one hand, she was sorry to miss any of her training sessions on principle; on the other, she hadn't exactly been looking forward to spending the afternoon being battered across the sky by wind with the rest of the riders while Frederick sat on the ground shouting at them until his armor rusted into one solid piece.

Though, at least it would have been exciting. The waiting area outside Chrom's office was probably the least interesting room in the entire palace, furnished only with a layer of carpeting, a few chairs and end tables, and a pair of palace guards who didn't seem to blink as often as they should have. The only other person in the room besides them was Tharja, sitting across from her radiating a palpable lack of interest in conversation. She, at least, had brought something to occupy herself, her pen hand jittering back and forth across an open notebook as she read out of a thick, dog-eared book with ominous imagery on the cover.

Sumia glanced around the room for the umpteenth time, hoping to suddenly spot something that would hold her interest until the meeting let out. The few flowers that had decorated the room made a pleasant sight piled neatly on the table in front of her, their petals having offered illuminating if sometimes contradictory interpretations of her fortune, and more importantly a decent outlet for fidgeting. Perhaps she could have burned through them at a more reasonable rate.

Eventually, slowly, her attention returned to Tharja. Perhaps she was just reading the wrong signals. She might be just as lonely as her. Either way there was nothing wrong with just trying some polite conversation.

Sumia cleared her throat politely. Tharja's pen stopped scratching, and without looking up her body language managed to communicate the many mortal sins involved in trying some polite conversation.

"Boring, isn't it?" Sumia said genially.

Tharja grunted, head still down. After a sufficiently awkward pause, her pen resumed skittering across the page. Sumia valiantly kept on tack.

"I mean, these meetings always seem to stretch on for ages, don't they?" she said, with the slightly desperate air of somebody on a desert island trying to build a boat out of coconuts. "But if you're waiting for somebody you can't even come back later because they don't keep to a schedule."

"And they try to throw you out if you listen at the keyhole," Tharja said, tilting her head up slightly, with a note of actual empathy in her voice. One of the palace guards twitched slightly in response to some resurfaced memory.

"I know, right?" Sumia said, smiling. Observational humor broke down barriers all over the world. This was working great!

They stared at each other for half of a minute.

"So, you're waiting for Robin, then?" Sumia said.

"Yes."

Another half-minute.

"He's in there a long time too."

"What do you want, Sumia?" Tharja said.

"Nothing! I'm just here to, um…" She hurriedly grabbed a bag by her side and fished out a piece of paper. "I need to show this to Chrom. There's a wall that got knocked down and we got it rebuilt and I was passing by and one of the builders said that monarchy-or-no-monarchy he needed the final sign-off on the contract." She felt slightly out of breath.

Tharja raised her head with a baffled look on her face. She put her pen down. "Sumia, you're the queen. Why are you delivering receipts?"

"Well, he said it was important," Sumia said, embarrassed. The pointlessness of the task had actually occurred to her, but at that point she had felt like she would rather deal with the wait than the awkward questions from a servant about why she had been sitting in the waiting room for ten minutes. Sumia had lost all fantasy of being a regal and enchanting royal figure, but she was still fighting for an aura of basic competency.

Tharja visibly restrained herself from further comment. "Well, that's very nice," she said, looking back down. "I expect you won't really have trouble footing the bill."

"Well, yeah. We kind of need walls," Sumia said, smiling awkwardly. "I told Chrom we should also have them restore that statue he likes, but he says the treasury's already too low."

"What statue?" Tharja said.

"Oh, the one over in the courtyard over by…" She paused. The tremendous age and subsequent labyrinthine nature of the palace confounded any attempt to give directions more precise than 'The corridor that's in the northeast but no, not the absolute northeast and also slightly south and not in the wing you're thinking of, probably. There's a chair near it.'

"It's that way," Sumia said, jerking a thumb over one shoulder. "There's a big statue in the middle, but it's gotten all cracked. Made of marble, probably used to be trimmed with gold. It's of a man standing with his sword held out in front of him like he's ready to conquer the world."

"Who is it?" Tharja asked absentmindedly, back to scribbling in her notebook.

"We don't really know, the head came off. Chrom just thinks it's a shame that it's gotten into such a poor state," Sumia said.

"Shame," Tharja said, her side of the conversation now sustained only by inertia.

"Oh, you don't have to be sorry," Sumia said. "I mean, it's not like there's some hex that could restore the statue, is there?"

"Yes."

"I know, right, but-" Sumia froze. She double-checked the grammar in her previous sentence to make sure she was interpreting Tharja's response properly.

"Did you say yes?" Sumia said.

"Yes. Wait, what?" Tharja looked up again and blinked in confusion. For a moment she stared blankly at Sumia, mentally replaying the conversation that had been occurring in her absence. Once back up to speed, she nodded.

"Yeah, I know some stuff that could do it," she said, shrugging. "But they wouldn't appreciate it. People around here are stuffy when it comes to dark magic."

"Well yeah, I know, but…" she let herself trail off, because the words 'it's such a nice statue' sounded a bit pathetic even to her. But it _was_ such a nice statue. Who cared how they did it, if they were restoring such a great work of art? And just imagining the look on Chrom's face when he saw part of his home restored to its former glory seemed enough to justify whatever it took, no matter how bizarre the magic.

She glanced back up at the two palace guards. A fly landed on one of their noses, provoking a startled expression and a self-inflicted slap exactly ten seconds later. When choosing guards to stand guard over waiting rooms at the center of buildings with completely secure entrances, qualities such as calf endurance were typically prioritized over an ability to put two and two together. Nevertheless, she leaned forward furtively, not wanting them to overhear anything that might cause suspicion.

"I think Chrom would be alright with it," Sumia said in low tones to Tharja, who had leaned forward to hear her without being prompted. "Just as long as it's, you know, clean. No goats or anything."

"If you want to do it the hard way," Tharja said, shrugging. She eyed the table in front of Sumia with a frown. "I owe you a favor for turning Robin off of that ridiculous Pegasus idea of his."

Sumia didn't really see how she had helped there, but she preferred to avoid looking a gift horse in the mouth no matter how suspiciously its chewing sounded like wood. "Great!" she said, trying to make a whisper sound chipper. "How long will it take?"

"I don't know, a few days," Tharja said, swiping some of the flower petals off the table and putting them into her bag. "There's stuff to look up. Plus prep work. Never a good idea to rush a spell like this, or else you wind up with weird failures, like my great-aunt Arna."

Before Sumia could ask what had happened to great-aunt Arna, and more importantly what exactly constituted a failure with dark magic assuming that most of Tharja's work was successes, the door to the meeting room swung open and the outgoing flow of tired generals and nobles stifled the conversation.

It had been quite a long meeting. Several people were rubbing their eyes or yawning, and the common sentiment based on a few snatches of hushed conversation seemed to be that the meeting could have been quite a bit shorter. And at the center of it all, carrying a pile of books and charts under one arm and a cheery smile on his face, Robin strode purposefully and confidently, poised as if daring somebody to ask his opinion on mixed infantry composition. He walked past Tharja, tapped her smartly on the head with his free hand as he passed, and with a swish of her cloak she was matching his stride back down the hall.

A few of the guests stayed to exchange brief words of farewell with Chrom, all very polite and courteous. Nobody lingered with him for too long, though. There seemed to be a universal fear that if they stuck around too long Robin would come back and start talking again. Once Chrom was alone, he took one glance around the room, and flopped heavily into the chair next to Sumia with a sigh so deep he seemed to lose ten inches in height.

He leaned his head on her shoulder, and she patted his hand absentmindedly. Well. How to bring this up? It shouldn't be too difficult to explain the reasoning. All she had done was give a slightly unbalanced dark mage free reign to do as she may with an ancient and irreplaceable work of art.

Perhaps it would be better to lead off with the receipt.

* * *

It had pigtails.

"Tharja," Chrom said, craning his neck up at the statue. "Are you really sure you got this right?"

"Yes," Tharja said defensively. "That's the original head dragged out of a storeroom, I just restored it. Went back and dug up all of the records I could find on the original sculpting. Found one or two sketches. Spoke to one of the artists. Everything is as accurate as I can make it."

"Well, the thing is older than all of us put together," said Robin, mirroring Chrom's expression of quiet bafflement. "Fashion trends change. At one point Lissa's hairstyle might have been synonymous with masculinity. Or maybe one of your ancestors was just a little weird."

Sumia didn't say anything. Too many mental faculties were occupied in trying to contain her laughter.

"At least that explains why the head was gone," Chrom said. He walked up to the plinth and ran his hand across the smooth marble. "Though the rest of it is really good. I can't thank you enough, Tharja. I don't know how you did it, and frankly I probably don't want to, but I can't say I'm displeased with the result."

It was, in fact, quite a good job. In general design, the statue wasn't really remarkable. It was a simple design of some man who was presumably some military figure or one of the late monarchs in a pose of dignified authority, one of those things that just turn up in royal courtyards like extra socks in loads of laundry. But the general impression was improved greatly by the quality of the sculpting. Everywhere on it there were small, subtle details. The angle of the cheekbones, the cock of the wrist, even down to the wrinkles in the knuckles- everywhere you looked you found some new minor detail the improved the general impression. Pity about the hair.

Sumia blinked, and tried to take it in as a whole. Once the initial shock of laughter had worn of, there was really only bafflement. Tharja wasn't exactly uncreative, but it was rather hard to imagine her standing up on a ladder holding a hammer and chisel.

Chrom and Robin were on their way out of the courtyard. Tharja was making motions to follow them, but Sumia stopped her with a hand on one shoulder. Tharja slowly turned to face her, her expression saying that while there were few things more unforgivable than trying some polite conversation, this was one of them.

"Tharja. Um. How?" Sumia said.

"What do you mean, how?" Tharja said. "I told you, I used a hex."

"Yeah, I know, but, I mean, how?"

Tharja sighed. She spun Sumia around so that she was facing the statue. "Pick out any minor detail. Anything smaller than one of the hands.

"Um, there's this stray tuft of hair on the left pig-"

"Good," Tharja said. "That isn't there."

"But-"

"I didn't actually re-sculpt the statue, I used a hex," Tharja said, in the same tones that one would use to explain that they arrived at the ground floor by way of stairs as opposed to the window. "It's an illusion. Pretty advanced one, too. Most illusions fail once you try to look at the fine details; they're only big picture stuff. So this one's got feedback involved. Projects the historical statue as a big-picture illusion, then when you try to look closer it picks up on what you're expecting to see and tricks you into actually seeing it."

"So it's reading our minds?" Sumia said, looking into that noble face oblivious to fashion with newfound suspicion.

"Sure, why not," Tharja said. "Bottom line is that you're going to keep seeing fresh statue no matter how closely you look."

Sumia walked forward and laid a hand on the statue's leg. It certainly _felt_ -

"It feels real because that's what you're expecting it to feel like," Tharja said dully. "Long as the general shape of the statue is right all that you have to reinterpret is texture, and trust me when I say that by sense of touch most people are blind anyway. I submit as evidence the way you reacted when Vaike stuck your hand in that pot of noodles and told you it was brains."

Sumia didn't answer. She was back staring up at the statue. She had to concede that there was nothing really wrong with the restoration job, unconventional though it was. Nobody would ever really know the difference, anyway. Well, nobody except somebody extremely obsessive about statues, and people like that tended to have trouble attracting an audience anyway.

"Can I go, then?" said Tharja, already walking out of the courtyard after Robin.

Sumia remained silent, still staring. It really did have a striking face. It seemed more confident the more she looked at it.

* * *

Sumia wandered back to the courtyard more than once over the next few days. The tiny little courtyard had seen more traffic recently than it probably had in the last decade, exclusively from the waves of visitors who couldn't believe from word of mouth alone that one of Tharja's spells had resulted in something aside from abject terror. Miriel's academic interest in the subject had kept her installed in the corner for about four days now, surrounded by books of antique sculpture-making and the library's meager offerings on dark magic. Simply asking Tharja how it had been done appeared to be unthinkable. Sumia took care to drop by and visit every now and then

"Assuming the available texts are accurate, I can at least ascertain the intended subject of the piece," Miriel said, voice even and measured despite the fact that she did not seem to have slept recently. "It seems to be a self-commissioned representation of Mercio the Unhinged, favored tactician of Chrom's great-to-the-sixteenth-grandfather."

"The Unhinged?" Sumia said.

"Most likely an exaggeration. Though I understand the pigtails are actually characteristic. He was of Plegian descent, and his political adversaries found it advantageous to assign him an unflattering moniker," Miriel said. She had picked up a book and was now flipping through it, despite the fact that her gaze still lingered steadily on Sumia. Come to think of it, her eyes didn't seem to be focusing properly. "He was not the first nor the last. Throughout this palace's history you will find records of those with similar titles. 'The Mad' is the most popular, though also present are 'The Terrible', 'The Deranged', 'The Loony', 'The Savage', 'The Imbecile', and 'The Slaphappy'."

"So how is your research going, then?" Sumia said, slowly and clearly.

"Quite well," Miriel said, now looking roughly ten inches to the left of Sumia's head. "I think I should be able to provide a suitable and scientific hypothesis for what's going on by tomorrow. Do come by then."

Sumia, of course, didn't feel comfortable leaving her alone. She seemed more transfixed by this particular problem than usual, and if she lost any more sleep over it than she might try to ascertain the history of the palace by reducing it into its constituent parts. But then again, she couldn't stay by her side forever. This lead her to realize one of the few fortunate aspects of being a queen in theory, which was that nobody asked questions if you tried to reassign the palace guards. The first person she saw was given orders to stand in the courtyard and come running to find her in the unlikely event that Miriel collapsed.

It took roughly six hours. The guard who came to fetch her seemed nonchalant about it. Apparently she had simply stared at the statue of Mercio silently for a while, started laughing hysterically, and fell asleep on a bench. Sumia approached her nervously, leaned down, and shook her shoulder.

Miriel opened her eyes. "Oh, hello Sumia. The statue talked to me."

This was good. Sumia had expected incoherent babble.

"What did it say, Miriel?" Sumia said patiently.

"Not a lot. Mostly it just said that I was correct," she said. Miriel swung her legs off of the bench and stood up smoothly. "I'm very tired. Sleep in a proper bed would aid my mental functioning, I believe."

"You get on that," Sumia said as Miriel walked away. Best to just be positive and reassuring.

Sumia turned back towards the statue. It gazed at her broadly, one eye closed. The serene expression on its face was calming, somehow. Miriel's fit wasn't too worrying, aside from it meaning she had dire need for rest. She had been staring at this thing for longer than anyone besides herself. Not to mention that she hadn't been in a very stable frame of mind for most of her vigil. There was no need for alarm, everything was just-

She blinked, and sent the guard to fetch Tharja as quickly as possible. The damn thing was winking at her.

* * *

"What's this about?" Tharja said grumpily as she followed the guard into the courtyard.

"Tharja," Sumia said. "Is that thing supposed to drive people insane?"

"Well not primarily, no," Tharja said, glancing up at the statue. "Was it anybody we know? Because I included an antitheft hex-"

"It was Miriel. She was only looking at it," Sumia said. "She's fine, but I thought you would know why she thought that it was talking to her."

"What did it say?"

"What does that matter?" Sumia said.

"These things can be illuminating," Tharja said, shrugging. "Let me guess. It said she was right about something."

"Yeah, I think," Sumia said.

"Then that's weird," Tharja said, apparently convinced that this hadn't been the case up until now. "She isn't insane. Well, probably."

Sumia sighed, and sat down to think for a few moments. She had some grasp of the situation, but wanted to make sort through it in her mind first. Tharja's train of thought had already left the station and she had a habit of throwing off passengers who didn't have tickets. "It's your illusion, isn't it?" she said eventually. "You said it shows people what they expect to see."

"Well yeah," Tharja said. "But it should only be able to trick people's sense of sight and touch. It shouldn't mess with any of the other senses unless something's amplifying it."

"Well, are there any other dark mages around here?" Sumia said.

"No."

"No."

Sumia took a deep breath in and out. "Tharja," she said. "Please tell me you just said 'no' twice."

"Oh, it's talking to you too?" Tharja said, looking back up at Mercio. "This is fun. It must be getting more powerful. Maybe it'll be able to manifest itself physically."

"Are you speaking from experience here?" Sumia said, desperately hoping the answer was 'no'.

"Yeah," Tharja said. "Did I ever tell you about my great-aunt Arna?"

"No?"

"Well, we didn't always have a great-aunt Arna. Frankly we wish that it had stayed that way."

"Tharja," Sumia said desperately. "Please just undo the spell."

"That'll be tricky. Spells like this don't like being taken away. I was very thorough," Tharja said, a slightly smug expression on her face. "It'd be easier just to get rid of whatever's amplifying the spell."

"What's amplifying it?" Sumia said. She was feeling that her role in the conversation was dwindling rapidly and wanted to stay relevant for as long as she could.

"Probably an overabundance of one of the material components in the surroundings." Tharja held up one hand and started ticking of items with her fingers. "You said no goats. So that would be ichor, a suitably rare species of flower, death's toadstool, wood of a willow, and some saltpeter as a preservative. "

"It's probably the flower petals," the guard said genially.

Tharja and Sumia both stared for a moment. Furniture didn't usually talk.

"What makes you say that?" Sumia said, recovering first.

"Well, I saw you grab those flower petals back when I was guarding the waiting area in front of the war room, and if those are the same petals you used in the spell there's probably something around her interfering with them," the guard said amiably. "Local grown, you know."

"You remember me grabbing the flower petals?" Tharja said suspiciously.

"Watch a room for ten hours, you start to pay attention to what changes in it," the guard said evenly.

Tharja watched him for a moment. Sumia briefly feared for his life.

"Well, you've got a point," Tharja said eventually, turning around. She bent over and started looking across the ground. "Are there any of those flowers growing in this courtyard? It would have to be fairly close to the statue."

Tharja trotted across the length of the courtyard, bent double. Sumia was back to staring at the statue. A thought was forming in her mind, but once again she wanted to make sure she could articulate it in a way that could make sense.

"Tharja," she said. Tharja looked up.

"You found it?"

Sumia pointed. Tharja followed her gaze, stared along with her for a moment, gave a smirk of approval, and nodded.

They left the courtyard. A few minutes later, armed with the necessary tools, they and a group of very confused servants arrived to provide an end to the problem at hand. A short half-hour of work hence, they had successfully retrieved the head of Mercio the Unhinged, possibly the only person in the palace's history odd enough to want himself immortalized with petrified flowers protruding from his skull.

* * *

"Personally I don't think it's much of a loss," Robin said, staring at the newly-newly refurbished statue, still gleaming brilliant white in the sun, looking good as new aside from the suggestion that the person depicted might not have been a terribly good tactician.

"An improvement, if you ask me," said Chrom. "We've got statues hanging around this place with no arms or legs. No head is just innovation."

"You don't want to get it replaced, then?" Robin said, glancing at Chrom. Behind them, a number of generals and major noble figures were filing into the courtyard. The appeared confused about the change of venue. Military planning was not an exercise associated with bright, cheery sunlight.

"No," Chrom said, turning around to face the assembled figures as they seated themselves on the hastily arranged chairs. "For now, we'll keep it. And for today, I think it'll improve everybody's general attitude towards long-winded tacticians."


End file.
